Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities

More than twenty years ago, when Italian Carlo Petrini learned that McDonald's wanted to erect its golden arches next to the Spanish Steps in Rome, he developed an impassioned response: he helped found the Slow Food movement. Since then, Slow Food has become a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring the likes of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan. Now, it's time to take the work of changing the way people grow, distribute, and consume food to a new level. On a global scale, as Petrini tells us in Terra Madre, we aren't eating food. Food is eating us. Large-scale industrial agriculture has run rampant and penetrated every corner of the world. The price of food is fixed by the rules of the market, which have neither concern for quality nor respect for producers. People have been forced into standardized, unnatural diets, and aggressive, chemical-based agriculture is ravaging ecosystems from the Great Plains to the Kalahari. Food has been stripped of its meaning, reduced to a mere commodity, and its mass production is contributing to injustice all over the world. In Terra Madre, Petrini shows us a solution in the thousands of newly formed local alliances between food producers and food consumers. And he proposes expanding these alliances--connecting regional food communities around the world to promote good, clean, and fair food. The end goal is a world in which communities are entitled to food sovereignty--allowed to choose not only what they want to grow and eat, but also how they produce and distribute it.

Review :
""Terra Madre" is the way Slow Food has kept itself the international pioneer in food justice and good food, defending the power of the small against the big and embracing the new. If you haven't been to this extraordinary gathering you'll want to go to the next-and Carlo Petrini will inspire you to find your own way to lead food into the future."--Corby Kummer, Senior Editor, "The Atlantic", and author of "The Pleasures of Slow Food" "Timely, essential, and full of joy!"--Judy Wicks, founder of White Dog Cafe "When the world's food traditions come together at "Terra Madre", we catch a glimpse of what it would be like to exchange, learn, share and widen our lives in ways that are truly sustainable. In this fine manifesto, Carlo Petrini captures the essence of that world, and offers an agenda for change that is both necessary and deeply desirable."--Raj Patel, author of "The Value of Nothing" "Terra Madre is the way Slow Food has kept itself the international pioneer in food justice and good food, defending the power of the small against the big and embracing the new. If you haven't been to this extraordinary gathering you'll want to go to the next-and Carlo Petrini will inspire you to find your own way to lead food into the future."--Corby Kummer, Senior Editor, The Atlantic, and author of The Pleasures of Slow Food "Timely, essential, and full of joy!"--Judy Wicks, founder of White Dog Cafe "When the world's food traditions come together at Terra Madre, we catch a glimpse of what it would be like to exchange, learn, share and widen our lives in ways that are truly sustainable. In this fine manifesto, Carlo Petrini captures the essence of that world, and offers an agenda for change that is both necessary and deeply desirable."--Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing